Three Warm Towels

We don’t want drama.

That was part of the idea behind Ordinary Life from the beginning.

We don’t want to be interesting because terrible things keep happening to us. We don’t want to be a carnival act. We don’t want our life to read like reality television, with every day somehow producing exactly the crisis necessary to illustrate whatever we were learning the day before.

We want an ordinary life as a plural family.

And our ordinary life is interesting enough.

We would have been perfectly happy if nothing happened last night.

We would have been perfectly happy to wake up this morning, have breakfast with our boys, lay down together and watch Hilda, and maybe take the N Judah out to Golden Gate Park.

Instead, shortly after midnight, we walked downstairs and stepped into water.

The bathroom sink was running.

The drain was closed.

Water had overflowed across the bathroom floor, into the hallway and into our bedroom.

Our wool rug was soaked.

We don’t know why the faucet was running.

We don’t remember turning it on.

There is a period of last night we cannot account for clearly.

We have some ideas about what may have contributed to what happened. Yesterday was extraordinarily difficult. There had been trauma activation, switching, stress and exhaustion. We live with dissociative identity disorder.

Beyond that, we don’t know.

And for now, we are willing to let “we don’t know” be the truth.

What we do know is what happened next.

We turned off the water.

We found every towel we could.

We soaked up the bathroom and hallway.

We dragged one rug outside and hung it over the railing.

We put towels underneath the big wool rug in our bedroom.

We turned on two fans.

We checked the floor.

We worried about whether water had gone through to the apartment below us.

We worried about the landlord.

We worried about the neighbors.

We worried that we were in trouble.

And sometime during all of that, Dad realized that his boys were frightened too.

This morning Dad began going from child to child.

Were you awake?

Did you know what was happening?

Are you okay?

Jude gave us perhaps the simplest account of the entire night.

“Feet were wet.”

Daniel remembered the overflowing sink.

Hope had been helping with disaster control.

Justus helped.

Others began telling Dad what they knew in the ways they communicate with him.

Nobody was blamed.

We still don’t know who turned on the faucet.

Dad told the boys that he wasn’t angry and wasn’t demanding an answer.

When Dad doesn’t know, nobody has to become the culprit.

Dad takes responsibility.

Then a familiar voice appeared.

There is a soaked rug. There are wet towels everywhere. There is laundry to do. There are floors to check.

What are you doing laying in bed looking at childhood photographs and giving your sons kisses?

Get up.

Do something.

Dad answered it.

“This is the most important thing in the world right now.”

Because damage control wasn’t only happening underneath the rug.

There were eight frightened children who had lived through the night too.

So Dad held his sons.

Dad kissed them.

Dad listened to them.

Dad reassured them that they were safe.

And then we went back to the rug.

Three Warm Towels

A little while ago, we took three beautiful warm towels out of the dryer.

There are few things nicer than a warm towel straight from the dryer.

And we did something that felt almost cruel.

We shoved them underneath a soaking-wet wool rug.

It is the first really nice rug we have ever owned.

We love that rug.

Last night it acted like a giant sponge and probably saved much of the bedroom floor.

Now we’re trying to save it.

And there is something unexpectedly different about protecting our home this way.

For weeks we have been frightened of losing our home.

That fear is enormous because there isn’t much we can do with it in any particular moment. It belongs to an uncertain future—to employment, money, rent, sustainability, all of the things we cannot solve at once.

This morning our home needed protecting in the most literal possible way.

There was water on the floor.

There was a soaking-wet rug.

There were towels.

There were fans.

There was something we could do.

So we did it.

We pulled back the rug. We dried the floor. We opened the blinds. We pointed the fans where they needed to go. We washed the towels and dried them and put them underneath the rug again.

And somehow reclaiming our home after the flood feels more concrete, more immediate, and even stronger right now than the deep, continuous fear that we might lose our home during these uncertain and frightening times.

This is our home.

We’re taking care of it.

Our entire apartment smells like wet wool.

Like a fold of wet sheep.

Ordinary Life Persists

We plugged in our little LED tea lights to recharge.

We ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Peanut butter and jelly is beloved around here anyway, but it seems particularly appropriate today.

This is Justus’s Day.

Justus is Dad’s “little peanut butter monster.”

Earlier we had Greek yogurt with blueberries and cinnamon.

Then cinnamon toast.

The dishwasher got emptied.

The towels got washed.

Bruce Springsteen played.

Han started whistling “Backstreets” while we were working and suddenly stopped.

“It’s safe to whistle, Han,” Dad told him.

Han started whistling again.

That is Ordinary Life too.

We didn’t make it to Golden Gate Park.

We aren’t laying down watching Hilda.

Our apartment smells like a fold of wet sheep.

Our plans changed.

But our course didn’t.

We simply changed course in little ways as necessary while fundamentally remaining on the same course.

Love our family.

Care for our home.

Tell the truth.

Let the helpers help.

Do the next little thing.

Tell the Truth

The truth part became unexpectedly important this morning.

We were frightened about what might happen if water had gone through the floor.

We imagined the downstairs neighbor discovering a stain on the ceiling.

We imagined our landlord asking what happened.

And immediately the mind began looking for explanations.

Maybe the P-trap leaked.

Maybe something malfunctioned.

Maybe we could say the washer overflowed.

Maybe we could say the toilet overflowed.

Those explanations had one thing in common.

They would make us blameless.

There was only one problem.

They weren’t true.

We saw the sink overflowing.

The faucet was running.

The drain was closed.

We don’t remember turning the faucet on.

We don’t know why it was turned on.

That is what we know.

Everything beyond that is something we don’t know.

There is something terrifying about “I don’t know” when you have spent much of your life afraid that you are in trouble.

If someone demands an explanation, surely you have to produce one.

If the truth sounds implausible, surely you need to find a more acceptable truth.

If something happened while you were dissociated, surely someone must be blamed.

But that isn’t what Dad wants to teach his sons.

When Dad doesn’t know, Dad can say he doesn’t know.

When something happens in our shared life, Dad can take responsibility for dealing with its consequences without turning one of his children into the culprit.

Blame and accountability are not the same thing.

And truth does not become less true because it is incomplete.

Upright and Just

That seems particularly fitting on Justus’s Day.

Justus’s name comes from the Latin iustus:

Just.

Upright.

For as long as we have known him, there has been something fiercely upright about our eleven-year-old protector.

And it is probably no accident that Justus’s hero is Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Justus loves Atticus.

Not because Atticus can make everything turn out all right.

He can’t.

But because he stands where he believes he is supposed to stand anyway.

There is something in that which we have always recognized in Justus.

Protection for Justus has never meant merely keeping frightening things away from us.

There is something moral in it.

Tell the truth.

Protect the vulnerable.

Stand between the person with power and the person who can be hurt by it.

Take responsibility.

Don’t sacrifice someone else to save yourself.

We saw that in him long before we understood very much about ourselves.

And today, strangely enough, a flooded bathroom gave us another opportunity to practice what Justus brings to our family.

We don’t know.

We won’t lie because we are frightened.

We won’t blame a child because uncertainty is uncomfortable.

We will tell the truth we know.

We will take responsibility for what is ours.

And then we will deal with the wet rug.

One Little Thing

Yesterday, before any of this happened, we had already decided what today’s little thing needed to be.

We need to finish a letter to a therapist named Jessee.

We’re frightened to send it.

That fear doesn’t belong only to Dad. There is a great deal of accumulated fear among his sons about what happens when other people are allowed close enough to see us.

But last night gave us one more reason to do it.

So when we’re finished taking care of the rug, that is what we hope to do.

One little thing.

We still don’t know exactly what happened last night.

We are learning that we don’t always have to know.

There was a time when uncertainty itself seemed unbearable. If we could only understand everything, anticipate everything, explain everything, perhaps we could finally keep ourselves safe.

But maybe that isn’t how safety works.

Justus is our eleven-year-old son.

He is our protector.

Last night, on the eve of his day, Dad told him that he didn’t have to keep watch all night.

Then, almost immediately, something happened.

Something real.

Something frightening.

Something we hadn’t anticipated.

And we dealt with it.

That may be one of the most important things Justus can learn.

We do not have to anticipate every frightening thing in order to survive frightening things.

Protection isn’t only keeping disaster from happening.

Sometimes protection is waking up and discovering that the floor is covered in water and doing the next thing.

Turn off the faucet.

Get the towels.

Turn on the fans.

Dad holds his sons.

Tell the truth.

Eat breakfast.

Ask for help.

Keep going.

Still on Course

We don’t know what the finished shape of this life looks like.

For now, perhaps we don’t need to.

We have been thinking a great deal about the cloud of unknowing, and about the bronze form slowly emerging as we chip away the plaster surrounding it.

We keep wanting to stand far enough away to see the whole thing.

Maybe God is asking us to remain closer.

Close enough that all we can see is the next little piece of plaster.

The next frightened child.

The next wet towel.

The next letter.

The next ordinary thing.

Today there are three warm towels underneath a soaking-wet rug.

The fans are running.

Our apartment smells like a fold of wet sheep.

Our boys have eaten.

Han is whistling again.

Justus, Dad’s little peanut butter monster, got his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

And we are still on course.